Views of a Nepali Economist

Bihar's development lessons for Nepal

*Notorious for criminal gangs, since 2005, Bihar has put 50,000 criminals behind bars.
*Since 2005, Bihar has added 30,000 kilometers of roads.
*25 percent of total state budget today is allocated to "education".
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190 cooperatives lose their licenses

*There are 22,646 cooperatives operating in the country.
*Of these, 10,500 are saving and credit cooperatives.
*Of these, 2000 have annual transactions over Rs 500 million.
*The central bank is planning to regulate these cooperatives that have annual transactions over Rs 500 million.
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The Oxford Poverty Report caused quite a commotion in Nepal when it was released in 2010 because it claimed that 65 percent of Nepalese lived below poverty. The National Planning Commission was quick to counter that by saying that according to NPC estimates only 25 percent of Nepalese live below poverty. Well, the NPC should have looked at the way the Oxford study calculated the poverty index. They called it Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MPI). The graph below shows the indicators used to calculate the MPI and the weights given to each indicator.

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SOME OPTIMISTIC NEPALESE DATA:


Real GDP growth rate is starting to climb up



 Per-capita GDP in US$ Purchasing Power Parity



Percentage of Immunized Children between 12 and 23 months



Number of Children per woman

Labels: bihar, central bank of nepal, cooperatives, data